learn guitar

I went on a road trip without the guitar for a few days last week, so I got out of the habit of sitting down and playing. I sat down yesterday, though, and I added a weekly email reminder just in case.

I’ve been practicing different strumming patterns… It’s more difficult than I thought it would be to strum and sing at the same time. I’ll be singing along, and then I notice my pick is going up when it should be going down, and I have to stop singing to get the rhythm back. I figure that’ll go away in time.

For practice material, I’ve been using tabs from http://www.e-chords.com/, and supplementing that with videos from http://www.youtube.com/. That way, I can see how people are playing, and get a better sense of the rhythms.

I haven’t been following the plan exactly as I made it, but I’m still practicing a little each day. I played the few songs I knew for my visiting family last weekend, that went fairly well… I’m working on different strumming patterns right now, and the bar chords still give me a lot of trouble.

Okay, here goes:
http://guitar.about.com/library/blguitarlessonarchive.htm

This site is sectioned off into lessons, and each lesson is in a handful of different parts. I figure I’ll go through one part per day, and then figure something else out once i get through the lessons.

I bought my roommate’s guitar about 3 years ago when he moved out, and I’ve plucked on it once in a while since then. I’d really like to be able to play (it’d be a lot better than watching tv). One of the guy’s I work with has an almost-band, and we were playing with the idea of putting something together.